Facebook Fan Pages Development

Nov

24

2011

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

Facebook Apps Development / Facebook Fan Pages Development  Posted by on November 24th, 2011 / 0 comments
Tags: | |

With Facebook user base reaching 1 Billion connected people mark and integration of more than 7 million websites, Facebook is the number one social networking platform. While every developer wants to be on this bandwagon to create applications and games, there are numerous tutorial websites sharing the tips and tricks on Facebook evolving API. For the assistance in Facebook apps development, It’s alright to use snippets from online websites but if you are developing a complex application or game, stand alone snippets won’t take you far. On top of that, you have a ever evolving Facebook API which makes development more difficult.

Also in larger complex Facebook applications, if you don’t adopt a consistent approach from day one, you might land yourself in bigger problems. For consistent approach, one way is to follow some Book where all most commonly used features and scenarios are explained with examples and code.

Facebook launched Graph API last year but they have made several updates since and now requiring all legacy apps to migrate to Graph API, and for Facebook Open Graph Beta, you can get some really useful ideas with some intuitive ready-to-use applications from Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook. This book focuses on both the concepts and implementations necessary to develop Facebook applications and provides ready-to-use code for common use cases and scenarios faced by most developers while developing Facebook applications. This book guides the reader step-by-step, from start to finish, through various stages of Facebook application development.

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook covers:

Chapter 1, Creating a New Facebook Application describes the first step towards developing a Facebook application which includes Facebook application registration process and downloading its PHP – SDK. Here, we will learn how to set up the environment and perform basic authentication to begin with Facebook application development process.

Chapter 2, Be a part of Social Graph presents some recipes to perform the most commonly encountered tasks of application development using the Facebook Graph API through PHP. Here, we will get accustomed to Facebook objects and connections and ways to use them to retrieve data.

Chapter 3, Querying Facebook demonstrates how to use the Facebook Query Language to query Facebook’s humongous database for retrieving complex user data.

Chapter 4, Using FB Script shows us how we can access all the features of Graph API using Facebook JavaScript SDK such as to performing authentication and retrieving user data directly at the client side.
This

Chapter 5, Expressing Yourself provides an insight into Facebook Dialogs. Here, we will learn
how to integrate Facebook Dialogs which provide a consistent interface to our applications.
Publishing streams, sending friend requests, requesting permissions and so on will become
seamlessly easy with these Facebook popup boxes.

Chapter 6, Bringing Facebook to your Website introduces us to the all time favorite Social
Plugins. Here we will learn how to integrate Facebook’ Social Plugins to a third party
application and connect with the Facebook world from virtually anywhere and anytime.

Chapter 7, Connecting Websites to Social Graph shows the users Facebook Open Graph
and ways to specify structured information about a webpage which determines how it will
be rendered in Facebook. Learn all about Facebook meta tags, their uses, and how to
incorporate them into your own web pages.

Chapter 8, Fiddling with Virtual Currency demonstrates how to integrate and use Facebook
Credits with our application. This chapter will show us how to use Facebook Credits as a
currency to sell our goods and services. It will also teach us how to handle transactions via
Facebook Credits API.

Chapter 9, Creating Advertisements and Analyzing Metric Data talks about Facebook Metrices
and Ads and recipes to retrieve metric data about our applications. Here, we will learn how to
record statistics and understand user interaction with our application.

Chapter 10, Creating Instant Applications houses some readymade exquisite Facebook
Applications. Here we will learn to develop few Facebook Applications right from scratch.

Chapter 11, Using Facebook Open Graph Beta introduces us to the newly launched Facebook
Timeline and Open Graph Beta. Here, we will learn how to create Facebook objects, actions,
and aggregations along with publishing user actions.

This book will provide enough ready to use examples that won’t just give you understanding of the working of Graph API but also will give you jump start in your development effort.

Jul

04

2011

How to Add Facebook Profile Photos Strip on Your Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Apps Development / Facebook Fan Pages Development / Social Media Marketing  Posted by on July 4th, 2011 / 1 comments
Tags:

The recent update to the Facebook Fan Pages Profile Photos has improved the design potential quite a bit and it has increased the scope of your Fan Page and Brand promotion and marketing efforts on Facebook.

In the new Facebook Fan Page layout, old tabs have been moved from the top of the page to the left side and replaced them with a row of five photos. Please see the screen shot below to check profile photos strip in a row of the Fan Page of PI Media.

This new Facebook Photo Strip and Profile Picture can be used as free adverts for your brand and whatever message you might want to send to your fans.

The main profile photo maximum size is now 180 pixels wide by 540 pixels high.

Facebook introduced five photo strip on personal profiles sometime back, designers have used creative techniques by cutting up one main image into 5 smaller images to make it look like part of one image.

Although you can fix the order of these thumbnails on your personal profiles, you can’t really do that on your Facebook Fan pages. Display order of these images is random so you need to design such pattern which could fit in any order.

See the attached image for ideas. I have cut the PI Media logo in 5 smaller parts, and although they load randomly, they still give a custom and unique look.

The photos which are shown in the strip are 5 most recent uploaded to yuor page and selected automatically. These photos can either be uploaded in your “Photos” sections and be part of an album or posted to wall in a post using the “Share” status bar. Size of your thumbnails for this photo strip should 100px wide by 70px high.

When you upload the photos or post update with image, they are shown in this strip randomly. You can remove any image you do not want to show in the strip by clicking on the ‘x’ icon on the top right cornor of that picture.

There is space for only 5 images at one time so if you want a consistent look and feel, keep removing images form the strip each time you post a photo on your page wall.

hope that helps.

Cheers!